Abilene Christian College - Prickly Pear Yearbook (Abilene, TX)

ACM team advances to national The Association for Computing Machinery programming team won first place in the graduatefuniversity division Jan. 18 at the ACM South-Central Regional Contest at the University of Texas in Arlington. Twenty-four teams from universities and colleges in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas competed in the graduate and undergraduate divisions. Since 1978 the ACU team has competed at the graduate X university level. Dr. Dwight Caughfield, associate pro- fessor of computer science and sponsor of the team, said, "The university division was easier for us to compete in because the types of problems presented in that com- petition were more like what the team members were doing in their classes." He said the graduatefuniversity level was for teams from schools that had graduate programs, and the undergraduate or college division was for teams from schools that did not have graduate programs. "But each school can decide whether it wants to compete at the university or col- lege level," Caughfield said. "For the past two years Baylor and Angelo State have competed at the college level. It's unusual in this region for a school that doesn't have a graduate program to compete at the university level." At the regional contest, the ACU team and the team from Baylor University in Waco qualified for the national program- ming contest, which was conducted Feb. 9-ll in Indianapolis, Ind. ACU did not place in the meet. Caughfield said contest winners were determined by the number of problems a team could solve in a limited amount of time by preparing a computer program. "The problems the team had to solve were similar to the problems that they en- countered in their course work," he said. This page: top - Dan Heard, a senior computer science major from El Paso and president of ACM, listens to Dean Ed Brown give instructions about graduation proceduresg bottom - Members of ACM. 226 ACM 'Y"""' if Q ,Je V 1 i FRONT ROW - Brenda Boyd, Diane Rider, Christie Coleman, Holly Campbell, Sarkis Pariai. ROW 2 Don Berryman, John Roberts, Steven Harper, Scott Boyd. ROW 3 - Cary Gray, Richard Bradford, Ke Caughfield, Dan Heard. ROW 4 - Dwight Caughfield, Bill Keenan.